[1.12.x] Far Future Technologies - October 9

[Kass__XAP]

Osiris is sent into the outer reaches as a supply vessel for the mining colonies.

[MrOnak]

Hi all,

I've installed Far Future Tech but I found it practically impossible to cool the parts, so I installed Heat Control as well. Now it's doable.

I'm just curious whether or not I'm missing a trick here?

[lemon cup]

4 minutes ago, MrOnak said:

Hi all,

I've installed Far Future Tech but I found it practically impossible to cool the parts, so I installed Heat Control as well. Now it's doable.

I'm just curious whether or not I'm missing a trick here?

You are missing no tricks, the high-tech radiators from Heat Control are virtually required to cool some of the more advanced fusion and anti-matter drives in FFT 

The goal there is to try to reflect some of the real-world challenges we would face in trying to bring this technology to life. In reality our most advanced radiators are nowhere close to the effectiveness of those in KSP, and these theoretical propulsion drives would generate much more heat!

[MrOnak]

@lemon cupthanks for the fast reply. Good to hear that I'm not missing something obvious I found it odd that FFT adds these engines without a solution to use them that isn't a mile-long stack of trusses with vanilla radiators, hence the question
Thanks again!

[Rakete]

Bugreport: Visual:

Exhaust of Frisbee flickering / engaged even if throttled to zero.... Test it in orbit.

@Nertea

 

 

 

2nd topic:

On 10/12/2021 at 6:39 PM, Nertea said:

Appreciated but this is a lot more involved that it looks. There is probably a better solution in the works but have no idea when I will get around to that. 

Any chance to geht this better solution to make it Stock-KSP-Working?

Edited March 23, 2022 by Rakete

[lemon cup]

Shenanigans in the Jovian system. Too bad there aren't any habitable moons here unlike the Joolian system... but I just can't pass on the planet visuals.

[Jacktical]

11 hours ago, lemon cup said:

Shenanigans in the Jovian system. Too bad there aren't any habitable moons here unlike the Joolian system... but I just can't pass on the planet visuals.

Reminds me of a certain trip to laythe  

[obnox twin]

Reminds me when I get access to my computer to get my gigantic (Hyperbole its just 75 meters) warpship built in orbit and send it on its way to view the star systems to see the visuals I have installed powered by 3 NSW engines give it to allow it to move around star systems so I don't waste precious Graviolium as that stuff is hard to get but this mod is awesome.

[Damienm]

Kind of hit a wall with Far future so i was hoping to get some tips.

I have completed exploration of the stock system and the best interstellar-ship I can build at the moment is with the Hammertong has around 4.5 mil Dv. Any more than this and im running into terrible gains for any fuel added as well as the twr being low enough and I'm really reaching a limit on part count as well.

I play at 2.5 scale so closest  star is around 1.2 ly away. Expending half the fuel I can get there in around 400 years however I'm facing the following issues 

• i begin the transfer burn from Kerbin by just targeting the star and setting Sas to target and letting persistent thrust do the months long burn however ive failed to get an intercept after many attempts. I'm too far from the star by the time I arrive to enter its SOI. how do I remedy this as  cant use the maneuver planner to plot over such large distances.
• secondly i need to keep atleast 300 Ec to keep the fuel from boiling off and the kerbals frozen but running the fusion reactor for so long takes alot of fuel, it burns through the remaining 2 mil DV worth of Deuterium before i even reach close to the star. i have tried adding a lot more but it takes a really ridiculous amount to keep the reactor running that long. so what can i do for EC in this period.

Edited March 30, 2022 by Damienm

[RedParadize]

@lemon cup I would be curious to know your graphic setting and mods

[SciMan]

So, I've got an idea about a new part for either this mod or Heat Control (more this mod's thing, as the issue only comes up with the engines from this mod).

You know how the NSWR engines have actually respectable specific impulse at sea level?

You know how the fixed radiator fins act like lifting surfaces, despite not having a defined lifting surface part module, which unhelpfully ruins any attempt to use said radiators to make a NSWR powered SSTO?

I have a solution, but it requires a new part and some new coding.

I don't know how it would be implemented on the coding side, but I have a fairly good idea of how the part should act in game.
You know how the oil cooler on the P-51 was shown to generate a small amount of extra thrust simply by the action of being fed cooling air by a low-drag air intake and having what amounts to a diverging nozzle on the "cooling air dump port"?

Let's do that, but with a waste heat radiator that rejects heat from these high tech engines and reactors.

The idea is a convection cooler, that also sort of acts like a thermal ramjet over a limited speed range.

I'm not saying you'll be able to maintain level flight with these as your only means of generating thrust, far from it. That's not the advantage I seek.

The idea is that it provides "ONLY cooling", instead of having the "side benefit" (that is actually a detriment) of the fixed radiator panels, which act like a giant wing (but, unhelpfully not telling you about it by moving the VAB/SPH Center of Lift marker because it has no Lifting Surface part module).

Instead of being a giant panel, they're a cylinder full of radiator fins and cooling air passages. I'm well aware that this means that they won't work outside of an atmosphere, but that's fine since we already have that angle covered elsewhere.

 

I mean, it's a simple thing really, it's just a tube with hot stuff inside it that has air being forced thru it by either convection (if it's oriented vertically with an air intake at the bottom) or the forward motion of the vessel (if it has an air intake on the front of the part).

 

The faster you're going, the more cooling it provides, until around say Mach 3. Then it stops working because the heat of compressing and slowing the incoming air raises the temperature of that air above the temperature of the radiators inside the forced convection cooler.

 

Thrust is NOT the primary reason to put this part on your vessel, COOLING is.
However, it DOES create "some" thrust, but only a tiny bit more than that which would offset the drag that the attached intake creates. After all, just like in the P-51's oil cooler design, thrust is just a side-effect of how it works. It heats air to keep some internal part cool, which makes that air expand, which makes the air accelerate inside a duct, which creates thrust.

 

At a standstill it would create no thrust, but still provide significant cooling (allowing for much more compact ground-based stationary reactor designs on planets that have an atmosphere, because in that use it represents a convection-based cooling tower).

 

The idea with this part (or range of parts, if it was to cover several diameters) is to allow the use of the high-tech engines that have high atmospheric specific impulses (like the NSWR engines) as the main engine of an SSTO that is potentially capable of interplanetary travel. And all without needing what would conventionally be described as "air-breathing propulsion", because those NSWR's are just that good, if you could just keep them cool enough.

[Nertea]

On 4/3/2022 at 11:53 AM, SciMan said:

So, I've got an idea about a new part for either this mod or Heat Control (more this mod's thing, as the issue only comes up with the engines from this mod).

You know how the NSWR engines have actually respectable specific impulse at sea level?

You know how the fixed radiator fins act like lifting surfaces, despite not having a defined lifting surface part module, which unhelpfully ruins any attempt to use said radiators to make a NSWR powered SSTO?

I have a solution, but it requires a new part and some new coding.

I don't know how it would be implemented on the coding side, but I have a fairly good idea of how the part should act in game.
You know how the oil cooler on the P-51 was shown to generate a small amount of extra thrust simply by the action of being fed cooling air by a low-drag air intake and having what amounts to a diverging nozzle on the "cooling air dump port"?

Let's do that, but with a waste heat radiator that rejects heat from these high tech engines and reactors.

The idea is a convection cooler, that also sort of acts like a thermal ramjet over a limited speed range.

I'm not saying you'll be able to maintain level flight with these as your only means of generating thrust, far from it. That's not the advantage I seek.

The idea is that it provides "ONLY cooling", instead of having the "side benefit" (that is actually a detriment) of the fixed radiator panels, which act like a giant wing (but, unhelpfully not telling you about it by moving the VAB/SPH Center of Lift marker because it has no Lifting Surface part module).

Instead of being a giant panel, they're a cylinder full of radiator fins and cooling air passages. I'm well aware that this means that they won't work outside of an atmosphere, but that's fine since we already have that angle covered elsewhere.

 

I mean, it's a simple thing really, it's just a tube with hot stuff inside it that has air being forced thru it by either convection (if it's oriented vertically with an air intake at the bottom) or the forward motion of the vessel (if it has an air intake on the front of the part).

 

The faster you're going, the more cooling it provides, until around say Mach 3. Then it stops working because the heat of compressing and slowing the incoming air raises the temperature of that air above the temperature of the radiators inside the forced convection cooler.

 

Thrust is NOT the primary reason to put this part on your vessel, COOLING is.
However, it DOES create "some" thrust, but only a tiny bit more than that which would offset the drag that the attached intake creates. After all, just like in the P-51's oil cooler design, thrust is just a side-effect of how it works. It heats air to keep some internal part cool, which makes that air expand, which makes the air accelerate inside a duct, which creates thrust.

 

At a standstill it would create no thrust, but still provide significant cooling (allowing for much more compact ground-based stationary reactor designs on planets that have an atmosphere, because in that use it represents a convection-based cooling tower).

 

The idea with this part (or range of parts, if it was to cover several diameters) is to allow the use of the high-tech engines that have high atmospheric specific impulses (like the NSWR engines) as the main engine of an SSTO that is potentially capable of interplanetary travel. And all without needing what would conventionally be described as "air-breathing propulsion", because those NSWR's are just that good, if you could just keep them cool enough.

You can already do this in configuration by using a ModuleSystemHeatRadiator with the convective fields adjusted: https://github.com/post-kerbin-mining-corporation/SystemHeat/blob/master/SystemHeat/SystemHeat/Modules/ModuleSystemHeatRadiator.cs#L37.. 

On 3/23/2022 at 1:46 PM, Rakete said:

Any chance to geht this better solution to make it Stock-KSP-Working?

Yeahhhhh... I'm done so no.  

[SciMan]

That idea of using ModuleSystemHeatRadiator on say a cylindrical part is a great idea! At least, it is for making use of what code exists already.
At least, for "cooling tower" like purposes for surface bases on atmospheric planets, this "don't use a flat part for the "radiator" part" idea would work great.

However, it's missing a few details that I kind of wanted to be implemented, when you go and try to use it for making it possible to use these high-performance FFT engines inside an atmosphere.
Namely, it doesn't work like some sort of engine that has an atmospheric intake for reaction mass supply, a connection to the SystemHeat waste heat coolant ducts for a supply of energy, and then some form of potentially-altitude-compensating exhaust nozzle, in order to be able to produce a small amount of thrust.
The whole point of creating a small amount of thrust is to create a small net positive amount of thrust when also considering the drag of other typical spaceplane parts like the spaceplane fuselage itself (since mk2 and mk3 profile parts have an unusually large amount of drag due to them containing a lifting surface module yet having a lot of frontal surface area, and that seems to confuse KSP's aerodynamics code), or the air intakes used to supply atmosphere to air-breathing engines.

However, I'm well aware that you're probably done adding code to this particular addon, so I suppose "making do with what exists" is what I'm stuck with.
It's not perfect, but it is something I could get working.

@Rakete

I actually have somewhat of a solution for this, if only when I change the values in the config it would actually do something (it doesn't seem to eliminate the issue, but it does reduce it quite a bit).

The issue that I have found that impacts the ability to use the engine to execute precise burns is not that the engines need to charge up before being used, rather it is that below a certain throttle level the engines themselves will entirely shut down, leaving your maneuver with several 10's up to around 50 m/s of delta-V left to complete the burn.
If they were able to throttle all the way down to 0% thrust without shutting down, yet required a (moderately small) amount of power to maintain the "charged" state, I think that would preserve the need to plan out your burns, yet allow you to execute them with enough precision to get where you're trying to go.
Because if there's one thing I hate having to have on a vessel, it's auxiliary propulsion systems to make up some deficit of the main propulsion system.
In fact, it is a self-imposed rule of mine that when I design a craft, it shall use the fewest number of different resources as possible, and the lowest possible number of different kinds of engines (clustering engines is fine, but they should be either all one model of engine like when you cluster Terriers, or the 2nd kind of engine should be intended to be used as an auxiliary kind of engine, like the Cub is intended to be a vernier engine).
The only exceptions I ever make for this self-imposed rule are the presence of RCS thrusters (and even then I prefer RCS that shares propellants with the main propulsion system), or when building an SSTO (as the ideal combination of engines is turbo-ramjets and aerospikes, because the specific impulse of Rapiers in closed cycle mode sucks, and the Rapiers also have this weird "kink" in their thrust versus velocity curve that makes piloting SSTO's that use Rapiers weird).
So when the issue comes up that I might have to include an auxiliary propulsion system simply because the main high performance propulsion system can't perform well at low throttle levels, it makes me rather frustrated.

What I did to address this is to create an MM patch to edit the config files of those engines, so that they no longer shut down below say 5% throttle.
It was not hard to find which line in the config file controlled what I wanted to adjust.
However, it took me 3 attempts before arriving at a value for that line that resulted in the behavior I intended.
My first attempt simply set that parameter to 0%. Upon testing, I found that this did not result in a change in the behavior of the engines. So I continued trying things.
My 2nd attempt set that parameter to 0.001%. This did result in a notable improvement, however I was still often left with some fraction of 1 m/s of Delta-V left in the maneuver node. Seeing results encouraged me to try an even smaller number.

My 3rd (and so far, final) attempt set that parameter to 0.0000001%. This resulted in the engines acting as I would prefer them to act, with the engines capable of throttling down far enough (but not to 0) to satisfy the operation of an autopilot such as MechJeb.
However, they do still need to be charged before every burn, which is a mechanic that I did want to preserve. I did not want these engines to be capable of rapid restarts without having a substantial power infrastructure on the vessel (such as a large fission or fusion reactor, or a large battery or capacitor bank).

[N3N]

On 3/26/2021 at 2:35 PM, Dimimon said:

Is Kerbalism and Far Future it Compatible?

Hey @Dimimon,

Did you find out if FFT works with Kerbalism (+JNSQ+RR)?

[BlackShade]

Any made fft work with Kerbalism?

 

[Grimmas]

Not by default. Someone made compatibility mods for SystemHeat (prereq) and FFT to work with Kerbalism (Google KerbalismSystemHeat and KerbalismFFT). The only problem is they do not work, there's an issue with the DLLs that crashes the game. In my experience you need to compile those mods and/or Kerbalism and/or FFT/SystemHeat yourself to get them all to work together and that is a bit of an adventure due to the weird way the Kerbalism build is set up. Advanced knowledge of Visual Studio build process is almost a prerequisite.

[BlackShade]

oh that sad but I will see if I can do it

 

[Grumpy_Bud]

How do you guys make such beautiful crafts? All of mine look like trash...

[Rakete]

A sense for aestetics is needed. 

[Grimmas]

5 minutes ago, Grumpy_Bud said:

How do you guys make such beautiful crafts? All of mine look like trash...

I don't think it's possible to not make beautiful crafts when using Nertea's stuff. Just install all his mods and have at it.

[Drew Kerman]

5 hours ago, Grumpy_Bud said:

How do you guys make such beautiful crafts? All of mine look like trash...

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. One man's trash is another man's treasure

[cinemagic]

Is there any other fuel tank mod that support FFT fuel types?

I mean I really need larger single tank, tired of adding over 50 antimatter tanks on my interstellar ship for 1% of lightspeed, or over 100 helium tanks for 500+ years of fusion electricity.

Edited May 22, 2022 by cinemagic

[BadModder54]

6 hours ago, cinemagic said:

Is there any other fuel tank mod that support FFT fuel types?

I mean I really need larger single tank, tired of adding over 50 antimatter tanks on my interstellar ship for 1% of lightspeed, or over 100 helium tanks for 500+ years of fusion electricity.

Tweakscale is your friend here. Less mods to load, infinite possibilities! 

[cinemagic]

7 hours ago, BadModder54 said:

Tweakscale is your friend here. Less mods to load, infinite possibilities! 

I'm pretty sure latest tweakscale version on CKAN cannot scale FFT tanks. Can you suggest any or share your patch for them?

[BadModder54]

28 minutes ago, cinemagic said:

I'm pretty sure latest tweakscale version on CKAN cannot scale FFT tanks. Can you suggest any or share your patch for them?

This  m a y  sound dangerous, but I've encountered no issues scaling Far Future tanks using the "All Tweak" mod. https://spacedock.info/mod/2100/All Tweak